NATIVE SPEAKERISM AND ITS IMPACT ON MULTILINGUALISM AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY THROUGH DISCRIMINATORY HIRING PRACTICES IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE TEACHING

Native speakerism is a language ideology that has permeated the language industry. This belief influences educational policies and hiring practices at the expense of cultural diversity and multilingualism; hiring native speakers exclusively and promoting their cultures dominantly reduces the voices of non-native speakers from diverse cultural backgrounds. Valuing only "authentic" British and American cultural expressions in classrooms poses a risk of cultural homogenization under the "native speaker" paradigm, thereby diminishing the recognition and celebration of diverse cultural identities among students. The native speaker ideal is promoted through marketing and advertising in the English language teaching market, demanding that candidates be native speakers of English. Therefore, employers are the first to perpetuate the myth that native speakers are the only ones capable of teaching English and delivering quality instruction to students. To learn more about how employers draft their marketing campaigns and what requirements they prioritize when announcing teaching vacancies, we studied job advertisements published on LinkedIn in the form of a post. The result of our research shows that some employers prioritize candidates who are native speakers. Besides speakerhood, they often have preferences for specific accents or country of origin. We concluded that native speakerism informs hiring policies, which favor native speaker teachers and indirectly hinder multilingual and multicultural education of their students. Such discriminatory hiring policies affect students' cultural competence and cultural literacy, thereby preventing them from experiencing diverse and multicultural classroom environments. We suggest ways to stand up to discriminatory practices and promote cultural and linguistic diversity among teachers and their backgrounds.